For quite a while now, the Hardware Leaderboard has recommended partitioning a large hard drive into two partitions, one significantly smaller than the other to achieve a boost in performance.  While the High End machine is likely to get an SDD in the near future to handle the OS and some programs the Budget and Midrange are likely to stick with the platter based solution.  The technique of using a smaller partition and there for keeping the reading head from moving around too much to improve random reads is called short stroking and Tech ARP would like to explain to you the various ways it can be achieved and what it can and cannot do.

“When we wrote the article, Modding A Barracuda 7200.11 Into A VelociRaptor, a number of readers insisted that we were wrong and the LBA mod works. Perhaps they didn’t read it properly – the article was not written to dismiss the concept of short stroking a hard disk drive to improve its performance. Far from it. We were merely pointing out that it was misleading to say that short stroking a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 will turn it into a Western Digital VelociRaptor.

Short stroking will not magically turn a 7200 RPM drive into a 10,000 RPM drive. As we pointed out in our article, that perception is somewhat illusory as the physical characteristics of the “modded” drive remains the same. However, short stroking will improve performance in certain situations… and believe it or not, most of us are actually short stroking our hard disk drives without knowing it. Surprised? We will clarify it all in this guide.”

Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:

Click Here to go to Storage  Storage